Everyone of us are accustomed to seeing a bulb glow when we switch on the button. Not even my small child looks at the bulb in wonder when it glows. Even she takes it for granted.  When my grand-ma who had all her life was ensconced in her own cuckoo in a small village in Kerala visited our house in Madras for the first time, her eyes split wide open on seeing the bulb glow and could not conceal her wonder. I too was a small child then and could not understand it. Then my dad explained that since she had not seen any light other than a lantern in her life, she naturally felt a miracle on seeing the electric bulb.

 

I remembered this incident much later in life, when around four years back, I showed the Internet and web for the first time to my wife. I thought it would be a wonderful experience for her, but she simply shrugged her shoulders and left saying ‘oh, nice’. I just couldn’t believe! Here, I was showing the experience of surfing the web for the first time, and she just says ‘nice’. I went to her and asked, ‘Don’t you feel it a miracle that you are able to access a mail from a far-away server instantly, at the speed of light?’ She said, oh, what a big deal? Computers are able to do things very fast!

 

 

Then I sat down and thought of the wondrous feeling I felt when I experienced the Net first time, and wondered why my wife is not able to feel the same way. Eureka! It dawned on me. My wife had seen the computer from the days of Windows 3.1, and high speed processors (Pentium MMX class)I had seen the computer from its infancy days, when you had to first boot the computer with a floppy (forget 3-1/2” it was 8-3/4” then), then load WordStar or whatever application (another set of floppies), and if you had not fallen asleep, type a letter and save it (yet another floppy) Forget 40GB hard-disk or even 1GB hard-disk. It was 20MB hard-disk the first time I saw it. Memory? 4 KB if you were lucky!I realized that since I was following the invention and understood the ‘protocol’ and other issues, I felt a miracle when the web really happened.

 

Most of web-surfers today belong to generation of my wife, who have been seeing the computer after it had evolved considerably, and therefore take everything for granted.I would like to ‘go under the hood’ and layman’s terms, explain the working of the Internet and world-wide-web (WWW) in this series of (weekly) articles.

 

 

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Next week: The Internet and web-Basics-How My Computer Finds Data from the Maze?